La séduction rouge et le bandeau écarlate

Cet article prend comme point de départ la chute vertigineuse de Bo Xilai en mars 2012 et analyse le contexte de la signification durable des héritages rouges en Chine, en particulier du maoïsme, pour comprendre la République populaire de Chine aujourd’hui. Si certains penseurs travaillent à sauver le marxisme, l’héritage rouge constitue un corpus de pratiques culturelles, intellectuelles et linguistiques qui sont profondément insérées dans le fonctionnement institutionnel de la Chine actuelle. Cette étude explore dans quelle mesure cette version de l’héritage rouge cannibalise d’autres critiques de gauche ou indépendantes et aide l’État-Parti dans sa mise en œuvre d’un agenda économique néolibéral avec parti unique

Red Allure and the Crimson Blindfold

This essay takes as its starting point the precipitous fall of Bo Xilai in March 2012 and discusses the context of the abiding significance of China’s red legacies, in particular Maoism, in understanding the People’s Republic of China today. While thinkers labour to salvage Marxism, the red legacy constitutes a body of cultural, intellectual, and linguistic practices that are profoundly ingrained in institutional behaviour in China. This study explores to what extent this version of the red legacy leeches out the power of other modes of left-leaning critique and independent thought, and abets the party-state in its pursuit of a guided, one-party neo-liberal economic agenda

Shared Destiny: China Story Yearbook 2014

Humanity as never before shares a common destiny, whether it be in terms of the resources of the planet, the global environment, economic integration, or the movement of peoples, ideas, cultures. For better or worse humankind is a Community of Shared Destiny 命运共同体. The People’s Republic of China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and its ‘Chairman of Everything’, Xi Jinping, has declared that it shares in the destiny of the countries of the Asia and Pacific region, as well as of nations that are part of an intertwined national self-interest. The Party, according to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory, is the vanguard of progressive social forces; it cleaves to the concept of shared destiny and its historical role in shaping that destiny. Since its early days nearly a century ago it has emphasised the collective over the individual, the end rather than the means. It addresses majority opinion while guiding and moulding the agenda both for today, and for the future

Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent

This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, and stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognises the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile

Feng Zikai : a biographical and critical study, 1898-1975

This is a study of the life and work of Feng Zikai (1898-1975). While Yu Dafu, a contemporary of Feng's, in the mid-1930s evaluated his essay style as being suffused with a "clear elegance and mystery which at its most subtle is far superior even to his painting", 1 and despite having produced a steady stream of essays up to 1949, Feng Zikai has come to be thought of predominantly as an artist, and due to his particular style of painting, the manhua, as a cartoonist. It is a categorisation th.at was further formalized in Mainland China after 1949 when he was redefined by the requirements of the State as a children's cartoonist, and this is how he was seen until even quite recently. Up to the early 1980s his work was either overlooked in Mainland China, or seen through the distorting glass of Marxist-Leninist literary historians.2 In Taiwan, on the other hand, because Feng chose to remain on the Mainland after 1949, he was shunned

History Writ Large: Big-character Posters, Red Logorrhoea and the Art of Words

The starting point of this paper is the 1986 artwork of the then Xiamen-based artist Wu Shanzhuan, called ‘Red Humor’, which reworked references to big-character posters (dazi bao 大字报) and other Mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the Cultural Revolution. It explains how Wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966-1967. This discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during China’s Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-1978) allows us to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern China. The paper argues that, since the 1980s, Wu Shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors’, since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the Chinese character (zi) in recent decades